Tomorrow (Thursday 10 February) sees the start of the second official F1 test at Jerez in Spain, a faster circuit than Valencia which hosted the first outing.

Everyone except Hispania will have new cars on test. Already we have seen some interesting solutions on some of the cars as well as some high degradation on the new Pirelli tyres. Valencia was mainly about bedding in new technology, in Jerez we will start to see some performance.

In this exclusive video, which I shot on Monday at Williams, technical director Sam Michael talks about the tyre degradation, the other cars and about the radical Williams back end and gearbox. He says that many of the solutions on the 2011 cars would have been impossible two years ago. He makes the fascinating assertion that the technical level in F1 is now so high that, “Nothing is impossible.”

Good... I thought he was the world's most serious man, for a time. And hey, sometimes you've just gotta smile... 🙂

I've enjoyed the blossoming rapport, banter and verbal sparring between Messrs Brawn, Whitmarsh and Horner (with even "Steve Sunday" joining in too) which to me has become more apparent over the last few seasons.

I'm sure that this always existed behind the scenes but it's good to see more exposure of this (the more human side of F1).

As always James unrivaled coverage. Its interesting to hear Sam talk about the Torro Rosso in that way. I thought most of the big teams had looked a the double floor and have dismissed it as too difficult to get it to work as the wind tunnel suggests it should. I know these were not recent evaluations but Ferrari did actually run with a double floor in the 90`s I beleive

That's very insightful video. Thank you James. "Nothing is impossible" verdict is quite important assertion which tells us where now the teams are. Restriction creates more creative engineers, as always. If you say a child "Don't do this", he'll do it one way or another. Brilliant.

By the way, I watched the whole clip wondering whether I could see Sam Michael smile at all. And at the very last moment of it, there it is! Now, I am a person who has more hope on life 😉

Well with Lewis (the fastest current Fi driver by far as well as the most racey) in one of their cars if they built a car as fast as the fastest he'd win every race and tat wouldn't be much fun would it? 🙂

Just a question about williams KERS, i havent seen anything about it yet. I recall Williams KERS prototype (i dont think it saw action over a race weekend?) for 2009 being based on a flywheel system, and have since provided systems for Porsche GT3R Hybrid and 918 concept? Are williams bringing this to the grid in their 2011 car, or have they gone with the traditional battery pack system that i understand the other teams are using/have developed?

They're using a battery based KERS. They had a small problem with it on the first day of the test last week so it didnt run the first 2 days - but it ran at full power for the whole of the last day at valencia so looking good!

Great insight into F1 and the design and engineering side. Did Frank Williams once day that F1 was is an engineering business that turns into a sport every few weeks during the summer?Love it, can't wait for the new season.

The iframe method is now the default for YouTube embedding. The advantage of the iframe method is that it allows both flash playback and HTML5 playback to work so the appropriate playback option can be used for each individual site visitor. In my case I use YouTube's HTML5 player as I don't have Flash installed. See http://www.youtube.com/html5 for some more about YouTube's HTML5 player.